The Kinsley Report

I first met Mike Kinsley in London about a decade ago, and have cordially disliked him ever since. He’s too young for my taste, too smart, and makes it all look too easy. The Prophet Job once cried in torment that he wished his enemy would write a book. I yearned for Kinsley to write a bad one, and for an editor to deliver it into my hands. How typical that only half my prayer has been answered.

For the last six years, if you remember, Washington has been dominated by a beaming dolt named Ronald Reagan. I mentally divide all the capital’s scribblers into two camps. Camp one consists of those who played it safe, sneering at the president when they were at sophisticated parties, but writing of him as a titanic “communicator.” Camp two consists of those heroic few who never altered their opinion that Reaganism was a huge tent meeting for the feebleminded. (There was a third camp, whose members thought R.R. was so cute he squeaked, but that’s too big a digression for now.)

In his collection of essays, Curse of the Giant Muffins (terrible title, terrible), Michael Kinsley deftly avoids these two choices. He thinks that the Reagan era has been a fraud on the public, but he also thinks that the liberals kind of asked for it. This is the strength and the weakness of a book that simply delights the reader—and how often can you say that these days? C.O.T.G.M. is funny, sometimes extremely funny, and it is also mordant and clever. Unlucky is the fraud or windbag who catches Kinsley’s eye. For instance:

I once wrote a column . . . about a small political scandal involving Charles Wick, head of the USIA (U.S. Information Agency) and a close friend of President Reagan. Although the piece basically came to Wick’s defense, it did contain the line, “By all accounts, Wick is a jackass.” A couple years later, to my surprise, Wick invited me to lunch at the Metropolitan Club. With some trepidation, I went, but it seemed he had no memory of this crude public insult. I was just one man on a list of journalists he wanted to inform about USIA’s magnificent accomplishments. Toward the end of lunch, I couldn’t resist saying, “It’s nice of you to have invited me here, Mr. Wick, considering that I once wrote that you’re a jackass.” Wick paused, then replied with great dignity: “I don’t mind criticism from the press, as long as it’s accurate.”

I’m sorry, but I think that’s bloody funny. It’s also a rather good encapsulation of the Kinsley style. It’s a bit longer than he usually needs for an anecdote, but it is observant and very well timed. It also illustrates his key belief, which is that journalists and power brokers both overrate their own importance in the most grotesque manner.

Everything about Michael is designed to madden the plodder. He’s in his mid-thirties and since leaving Harvard has been editor of The New Republic twice. In between, he edited Harper’s and was quite happy to leave New York (which he inexplicably loathes) when he found he didn’t get on with the owners. He’s also been the leaven in the lump as contributor to The Washington Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, and Fortune. His New Republic column, named “TRB” for ancestral reasons that only the graybeards on the magazine can guess at, is widely syndicated and in the opening stages of Irangate caused Pat Buchanan to disappear in a celebrated torrent of foam. Yet, says Kinsley mildly, he often wishes he had stayed with the law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. This is the L.A. law emporium run by William French Smith, where he was a “summer associate” more than ten years ago. Do you wonder that I resent Kinsley, and seek him out?

‘Lobbying is an ideal illustration of TRB’s Law of Scandal, which holds that the scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal.”

O.K., we could all have said that. It’s obvious. But nobody did quite say it, all through the years of Deaver and Donovan, North and Poindexter, Burford and Meese (after which “standards” became a cry once again). Kinsley has a way of combining the epigram with the aphorism, or, if you prefer, of getting a moral into a mnemonic. This is true whether you like his point or not. His take on the gruesome, weepy Country (you remember Jessica Lange as Mrs. Ivy, the peasant?): “Like most Americans who imagine they want the government to get off their backs, what the fabled Ivys really want is to nurse unmolested at the government teat.” A punchy point, made no worse by a slight dangle in the modifier.

Kinsley is a foe of sentimentality, in short. When Claud Cockburn was guest editor of Private Eye, he used to assemble the staff in a Soho pub and ask them who seemed irreproachable. Who, he would demand, was deemed to be above criticism? Who was getting away with a spotless reputation? After a bit, someone would nervously mention a paragon like Albert Schweitzer. “Right!” Claud would boom. “Let’s have a go at old Schweitzer!”

Kinsley follows this precept keenly. Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth? A “comic masterpiece.” William Shawn’s New Yorker? “Its smug insularity, its tiny dada conceits passing as wit, its whimsy presented as serious politics, and its deadpan narratives masquerading as serious journalism.” Of Felix Rohatyn, terminally respected and authoritative investment adviser: “Twelve years ago, Rohatyn only hung around with corporate types. But now, he’s come to treasure the wisdom of the best people in all walks of life. And with that, his journey from fixer to philosopher is over.” As for the saintly James “Scotty” Reston, you just have to read the whole piece entitled “Reston for President,” which is almost worth the price of admission on its own.

I have a test which I apply to the “fearlessly irreverent” types: will they rubbish the Kennedys? Actually, Michael Kinsley briefly resigned as editor of The New Republic, back in 1979, because an article by Suzannah Lessard rubbishing Teddy and dwelling on his amours was dumped out of the magazine by the owner. It wasn’t that much of a piece, but, as Kinsley told me one lunchtime, “Marty killed the article even though he agreed with it. He was just chicken.”

Qu’ est-ce que c’ est Marty? Was ist das Marty? Martin Peretz is the character who owns The New Republic. Under his stewardship, the magazine has moved away from its former liberalism in order to embrace such Peretzian favorites as the contras and Ivan Boesky. Indeed, one of Kinsley’s most spirited columns, against aid to the contras, was written in direct rebuttal to the pro-contra editorial that appeared in the same issue of the magazine he edits. He did the best he could, as we mangled our lunch, to make a virtue of this pantomime-horse effect: “It means we get called ‘unpredictable,’ which is kind of silly but doesn’t do us any harm. Marty publishes a lot of stuff he doesn’t like, and I publish a lot of stuff I don’t like. But if Marty really wants something, or really doesn’t want something, he wins. That’s capitalism.” I couldn’t immediately think how to disagree with this disarmingly frank assessment. The New Republic has printed some obsessive nonsense and some nasty vendettas, but Kinsley’s analysis means that he can have it both ways.

The qualities of his prose—mockery, agility, impatience with fools—are also the qualities of his conversation. A favorite put-down word, in print and in chat, is “fancy” (as an adjective, not a verb). No frills, please—I’m a reformer. He’s the grand antagonist of the tax shelter, the country-club write-off, the bullshit speech writer, and the overpaid “consultant.” This ought to mean that he’s poison in the Washington social world (“whatever that is,” I can hear him say), but in fact he’s rather sought after as a wit and as a spare man.

Spare man? Women talk of him continually, and speculatively. They like him, and he likes them back. But it seems he’s liked his work even more. I had to make him have some wine—because he’s pretty much booze-free—to celebrate selling his bachelor condo and moving to the burbs. “My new place,” he said, “is big enough for the wife and kids I haven’t yet got.” Moodily, I assured him that this was an improvement on having the wife and kids without the big house in the burbs.

I worry about his passions, even so. He’s a master of ridicule, but he doesn’t seem to care all that much. “What would you be shot for, Michael? I mean, what would take you to the stake?” “I’m not sure yet.” Not sure. What kind of an answer is that? I once wrote, of the neoliberal school to which he belongs, that it had opinions but not convictions. “Well, I hope I do have convictions as well as opinions, but the only time I was ever paid for a speech, I sent the fee to Citizens for Tax Justice.” Sounds a bit neoliberal to me.

You can find this same diffidence throughout the book, whose awful title was itself the result of a conscious decision not to call it Out of Step or Against the Current or anything that suggested he took himself too seriously. Introducing the section on “Fads,” he writes, laconically:

The short attention span of Americans is a continuous blessing for journalists and politicians. We can whip up a nice froth of hysteria on any subject we wish, without much fear that the audience will complain, “Wait a minute. We’re still hysterical over the matter you were importuning us about last month.” The pieces in this section are reprinted in chronological order, since the point (I suppose) is that if it’s not one thing, it’s another.

Another chapter, he explains, “consists of miscellaneous grumps that don’t fit in any other category, even by the low standards of relevance I’ve set in this book.” This shrugging, so-what style is defensive.

There is something definitely English as well as Jewish about Kinsley’s humor (he likes, and reads, Private Eye and The Spectator), and he admits to a guarded Anglophilia. “It started as Anglophobia, because I was sent to a pseudo-Brit school called Cranbrook, which is in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and models itself on an English private school in Kent.” God knows what effect this must have had on a boy all four of whose grandparents were born in Eastern Europe. But then he visited England, found that “it actually was green and pleasant,” went to Oxford, and now makes an annual pilgrimage to London. The Times there takes his column, which is a compliment of a kind even if the paper has now gone down the Murdoch drain. I can’t think of another American columnist whose writing would “travel” with such facility.

On the other hand, I remember Kinsley as almost the only journalist in Washington who was invited to meet Charles and Di at the British Embassy and who gave his invitation away. While others of his fellow countrymen were making an awesome spectacle of themselves, he held himself aloof. It is this refusal to be impressed that makes him a good journalist and that has allowed him to chronicle and survive the absurdities of the Reagan era.

It also helps, I think, that Kinsley knows a bit about economics. Most journalists can’t even do their creative expenses without the help of a C. P. A., and are much too easily impressed by the authority of economists. Not Michael. Here is his response to the Nobel Prize for Economics that was awarded to Professor James Buchanan of George Mason University last year. (Buchanans seem to bring out the beast in Kinsley.) Professor Buchanan had been credited (if that’s the word) with founding an economic discipline called “public choice,” which pointed out such things as that government spending could lead to deficits. Oh yeah?

A subspecialty of “academic choice” theory, called “university choice,” attempts to explain how a university-on-the-make like George Mason develops a symbiotic relationship with the business community in which corporations and right-wing foundations supply it with money and it supplies them with useful theories. Higher education theory previously held that universities should be founts of disinterested scholarship. Yet the “university choice” school does not accept this simplified view.

This appeared in the Wall Street Journal, and drew squealing letters from Milton Friedman and others.

Kinsley is no conservative (“Reagan’s comeuppance is democracy’s salvation. . . . Dry those tears and repeat after me: Ha. Ha. Ha” was the phrasing that caused Pat Buchanan to go into labor). But he delights in the discomfiture of liberals and their assumptions. This comes from his early association with the rather irritating and high-minded Washington Monthly, whose editor, Charles Peters, is a foe of big spending and featherbedding and thinks journalists are overpaid. Kinsley’s scorn for New Deal and even social-democratic yearnings often makes him say things that, while quite funny, aren’t quite true: “No human sorrow is alien to the Democratic Party. First we need to ‘know more.’ Knowing more will lead to a government program, and soon the problem will be solved.”

If only the Democrats were like that. This is one of the few examples I can find of Kinsley writing something that simply glints with prevailing orthodoxy. (His view that Jonathan Schell is exaggerating the nuclear threat may have been another unconscious concession to the spirit of the times.)

Usually, though, his motto—“If you’re scared to go too far, you won’t go far enough”—Serves him well. Kinsley has a highly evolved wit, and his essays, while they could always go farther, often go quite far enough.